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THE CITY WITHOUT A CHURCH 



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THE CITY WITHOUT 
A CHURCH 



AN ADDRESS 



BY 



HENRY DRUMMOND, F.R.S.E., F.G.S. 



FIRST EDITION 
SIXTY THOUSAND 



NEW YORK 

JAMES POTT & CO. 

114 Fifth Avenue 

1893 



V 



V 






* v # 



Copyright, 1892, by 
HENRY DRUMMOND 



TROW DIRECTORY 

PRINTING AND BOOKBINDING COMPANY 

NEW YORK 



H, 5obn, 

Saw tbe 1bol£ Ctt& 

IRew Jerusalem, 

Coming Sown from 6oD out of Ibeavem 

* * * 

BnD 1T saw.no temple tberefm 

* # * 

BnD 1bts servants sball serve 1blm ; 

BnD tbeg sball see 1bts jfaee; 

BnD l)is 1Rame sball be written on tbeir forebea&s. 



CONTENTS. 



PAGE 



I Saw the City, 9 

His Servants shall Serve, . . . .23 
I Saw no Temple There, 38 




THE CITY WITHOUT A CHURCH 



I SAW THE CITY. 



Two very startling things arrest us in John's 
vision of the future. The first is that the 
likest thing to Heaven he could think of was 
a City; the second, that there was no Church 
in that City. 

Almost nothing more revolutionary could be 
said, even to the modern world, in the name 
of religion. No Church — that is the defiance 
of religion ; a City — that is the antipodes of 



IO THE CITY WITHOUT A CHURCH. 

Heaven. Yet John combines these contradic- 
tions in one daring image, and holds up to the 
world the picture of a City without a Church as 
his ideal of the heavenly life. 

By far the most original thing here is the 
simple conception of Heaven as a City. The 
idea of religion without a Church — " I saw no 
Temple therein " — is anomalous enough ; but 
the association of the blessed life with a City — 
the one place in the world from which Heaven 
seems most far away — is something wholly new 
in religious thought. No other religion which 
has a Heaven ever had a Heaven like this. 
The Greek, if he looked forward at all, awaited 
the Elysian Fields ; the Eastern sought Nir- 
vana. All other Heavens have been Gardens, 
Dreamlands — passivities more or less aimless. 
Even to the majority among ourselves Heaven 
is a siesta and not a City. It remained for 



I SAW THE CITY. II 

John to go straight to the other extreme and 
select the citadel of the world's fever, the 
ganglion of its unrest, the heart and focus of its 
most strenuous toil, as the framework for his 
ideal of the blessed life. 

The Heaven of Christianity is different from 
all other Heavens, because the religion of 
Christianity is different from all other religions. 
Christianity is the religion of Cities. It moves 
among real things. Its sphere is the street, the 
market-place, the working-life of the world. 

And what interests one for the present in 
John's vision is not so much what it reveals of 
a Heaven beyond, but what it suggests of the 
nature of the heavenly life in this present 
world. Find out what a man's Heaven is — no 
matter whether it be a dream or a reality, no 
matter whether it refer to an actual Heaven or 
to a Kingdom of God to be realized on earth — 



12 THE CITY WITHOUT A CHURCH. 

and you pass by an easy discovery to what his 
religion is. And herein lies one value at least 
of this allegory. It is a touchstone for Christi- 
anity, a test for the solidity or the insipidity of 
one's religion, for the wholesomeness or the 
fatuousness of one's faith, for the usefulness or 
the futility of one's life. For this vision of the 
City marks off in lines which no eye can mis- 
take the true area which the religion of Christ 
is meant to inhabit, and announces for all time 
the real nature of the saintly life. 

City life is human life at its intensest, man 
in his most real relations. And the nearer one 
draws to reality, the nearer one draws to the 
working sphere of religion. Wherever real life 
is, there Christ goes. And He goes there, not 
only because the great need lies there, but be- 
cause there is found, so to speak, the raw ma- 
terial with which Christianity works — the life 



I SAW THE CITY. 1 3 

of man. To do something with this, to infuse 
something into this, to save and inspire and 
sanctify this, the actual working life of the 
world, is what He came for. Without human 
life to act upon, without the relations of men 
with one another, of master with servant, hus- 
band with wife, buyer with seller, creditor w r ith 
debtor, there is no such thing as Christianity. 
With actual things, with Humanity in its 
every-day dress, with the traffic of the streets, 
with gates and houses, with work and wages, 
with sin and poverty, with these tilings, and 
all the things and all the relations and all the 
people of the City, Christianity has to do, and 
has more to do than with anything else. To 
conceive of the Christian religion as itself a 
thing — a something which can exist apart from 
life ; to think of it as something added on to 
being, something kept in a separate compart- 



14 THE CITY WITHOUT A CHURCH. 

ment called the soul, as an extra accomplish- 
ment like music, or a special talent like art, is 
totally to misapprehend its nature. It is that 
which fills all compartments. It is that which 
makes the whole life music and every sep- 
arate action a work of art. Take away ac- 
tion and it is not. Take away people, houses, 
streets, character, and it ceases to be. Without 
these there may be sentiment, or rapture, or 
adoration, or superstition ; there may even be 
religion, but there can never be the religion of 
the Son of Man. 

If Heaven were a siesta, religion might be 
conceived of as a reverie. If the future life 
were to be mainly spent in a Temple, the 
present life might be mainly spent in Church. 
But if Heaven be a City, the life of those 
who are going there must be a real life. The 
man who would enter John's Heaven, no mat- 



I SAW THE CITY. 1 5 

ter what piety or what faith he may profess, 
must be a real man. Christ's gift to men was 
life, a rich and abundant life. And life is 
meant for living. An abundant life does not 
show itself in abundant dreaming, but in abun- 
dant living — in abundant living among real 
and tangible objects, and to actual and practi- 
cal purposes. " His servants," John tells us, 
" shall serve." In this vision of the City he 
confronts us with a new definition of a Chris- 
tian man — the perfect saint is the perfect citi- 
zen. 

To make Cities — that is w r hat we are here 
for. To make good Cities — that is for the pres- 
ent hour the main w r ork of Christianity. For 
the City is strategic. It makes the towns ; the 
towns make the villages ; the villages make the 
country. He who makes the City makes the 
world. After all, though men make Cities, 



16 THE CITY WITHOUT A CHURCH. 

it is Cities which make men. Whether our 
national life is great or mean, whether our 
social virtues are mature or stunted, whether 
our sons are moral or vicious, whether religion 
is possible or impossible, depends upon the 
City. When Christianity shall take upon it- 
self in full responsibility the burden and care 
of Cities the Kingdom of God will openly 
come on earth. What Christianity waits for 
also, as its final apologetic and justification to 
the world, is the founding of a City which 
shall be in visible reality a City of God. Peo- 
ple do not dispute that religion is in the 
Church. What is now wanted is to let them 
see it in the City. One Christian City, one 
City in any part of the earth, whose citizens 
from the greatest to the humblest lived in the 
spirit of Christ, where religion had overflowed 
the Churches and passed into the streets, in- 



I SAW THE CITY. 1 7 

undating every house and workshop, and per- 
meating the whole social and commercial life 
— one such Christian City would seal the re- 
demption of the world. 

Some such City, surely, was what John saw 
in his dream. Whatever reference we may 
find there to a world to come, is it not equally 
lawful to seek the scene upon this present 
world ? John saw his City descending out of 
Heaven. It was, moreover, no strange appari- 
tion, but a City which he knew. It was Je- 
rusalem, a new Jerusalem. The significance 
of that name has been altered for most of us 
by religious poetry ; we spell it with a capital 
and speak of the New Jerusalem as a syn- 
onym for Heaven. Yet why not take it sim- 
ply as it stands, as a new Jerusalem ? Try to 
restore the natural force of the expression — 
suppose John to have lived to-day and to have 



1 8 THE CITY WITHOUT A CHURCH. 

said London ? "I saw a new London ? " Je- 
rusalem was John's London. All the grave 
and sad suggestion that the word London 
brings up to-day to the modern reformer, the 
word Jerusalem recalled to him. What in his 
deepest hours he longed and prayed for was a 
new Jerusalem, a reformed Jerusalem. And 
just as it is given to the man in modern 
England who is a prophet, to the man who 
believes in God and in the moral order of the 
world, to discern a new London shaping itself 
through all the sin and chaos of the City, so 
was it given to John to see a new Jerusalem 
rise from the ruins of the old. 

We have no concern — it were contrary to 
critical method — to press the allegory in detail. 
What we take from it, looked at in this light, 
is the broad conception of a transformed City, 
the great Christian thought that the very 



I SAW THE CITY. 19 

Cities where we live, with all their suffering 
and sin, shall one day, by the gradual action 
of the forces of Christianity, be turned into 
Heavens on earth. This is a spectacle which 
profoundly concerns the world. To the re- 
former, the philanthropist, the economist, the 
politician, this Vision of the City is the great 
classic of social literature. What John saw, we 
may fairly take it, was the future of all Cities. 
It was the dawn of a new social order, a re- 
generate humanity, a purified society, an act- 
ual transformation of the Cities of the world 
into Cities of God. 

This City, then, which John saw is none other 
than your City, the place where you live — as it 
might be, and as you are to help to make it. It 
is London, Berlin, New York, Paris, Melbourne, 
Calcutta — these as they might be, and in some 
infinitesimal degree as they have already begun 



20 THE CITY WITHOUT A CHURCH. 

to be. In each of these, and in every City 
throughout the world to-day, there is a City 
descending out of Heaven from God. Each one 
of us is daily building up this City or helping to 
keep it back. Its walls rise slowly, but, as we 
believe in God, the building can never cease. 
For the might of those who build, be they few 
or many, is so surely greater than the might of 
those who retard, that no day's sun sets over 
any City in the land that does not see some 
stone of the invisible City laid. To believe this 
is faith. To live for this is Christianity. 

The project is delirious ? Yes — to atheism. 
To John it was the most obvious thing in the 
world. Nay, knowing all he knew, its realiza- 
tion was inevitable. We forget, when the thing 
strikes us as strange, that John knew Christ. 
Christ was the Light of the World — the Light 
of the World. This is all that he meant by his 



I SAW THE CITY. 21 

Vision, that Christ is the Light of the World. 
This Light, John saw, would fall everywhere — 
especially upon Cities. It was irresistible and 
inextinguishable. No darkness could stand be- 
fore it. One by one the Cities of the world 
would give up their night. Room by room, 
house by house, street by street, they would be 
changed. Whatsoever worketh abomination or 
maketh a lie would disappear. Sin, pain, sor- 
row, would silently pass away. One day the 
walls of the City would be jasper; the very 
streets would be paved with gold. Then the 
kings of the earth would bring their glory and 
honour into it. In the midst of the streets 
there should be a tree of Life. And its leaves 
would go forth for the healing of the nations. 

Survey the Cities of the world to-day, sur- 
vey your own City — town, village, home — and 
prophesy. God's kingdom is surely to come 



22 THE CITY WITHOUT A CHURCH. 

in this world. God's will is surely to be done 
on earth as it is done in Heaven. Is not this 
one practicable way of realizing it ? When a 
prophet speaks of something that is to be, 
that coming event is usually brought about 
by no unrelated cause or sudden shock, but 
in the ordered course of the world's drama. 
With Christianity as the supreme actor in the 
world's drama, the future of its Cities is even 
now quite clear. Project the lines of Christian 
and social .progress to their still far-off goal, 
and see even now that Heaven must come to 
earth. 





II. 

HIS SERVANTS SHALL SERVE. 

If anyone wishes to know what he can do 
to help on the work of God in the world, let 
him make a City, or a street, or a house of 
a City. Men complain of the indefiniteness 
of religion. There are thousands ready in 
their humble measure to offer some personal 
service for the good of men, but they do not 
know where to begin. Let me tell you where 
to begin — where Christ told His disciples to 
begin, at the nearest City. I promise you 
that before one week's work is over you will 



24 THE CITY WITHOUT A CHURCH. 

never again be haunted by the problem of 
the indefiniteness of Christianity. You will 
see so much to do, so many actual things to 
be set right, so many merely material condi- 
tions to alter, so much striving with employ- 
ers of labour, and City -councils, and trade 
agitators, and Boards, and Vestries and Com- 
mittees ; so much pure, unrelieved, uninspir- 
ing hard work, that you will begin to won- 
der whether in all this naked realism you are 
on holy ground at all. Do not be afraid of 
missing Heaven in seeking a better earth. 
The distinction between secular and sacred is 
a confusion and not a contrast ; and it is only 
because the secular is so intensely sacred that 
so many eyes are blind before it. The really 
secular thing in life is the spirit which de- 
spises under that name what is but part of 
the everywhere present work and will of God. 



HIS SERVANTS SHALL SERVE. 2$ 

Be sure that, down to the last and pettiest 
detail, all that concerns a better world is the 
direct concern of Christ. 

I make this, then, in all seriousness as a de- 
finite, practical proposal. You wish, you say, 
to be a religious man. Well, be one. There 
is your City ; begin. But what are you to 
believe ? Believe in your City. What else ? 
In Jesus Christ. What about Him ? That 
He wants to make your City better ; that that 
is what He would be doing if He lived there. 
What else ? Believe in yourself — that you, 
even you, can do some of the work which 
He would like done, and that unless you do 
it, it will remain undone. How are you to 
begin ? As Christ did. First He looked at 
the City ; then He wept over it ; then He 
died for it. 

Where are you to begin ? Begin where you 



26 THE CITY WITHOUT A CHURCH. 

are. Make that one corner, room, house, office, 
as like Heaven as you can. Begin ? Begin 
with the paper on the walls, make that beauti- 
ful ; with the air, keep it fresh ; with the very 
drains, make them sweet ; with the furniture, 
see that it be honest. Abolish whatsoever 
worketh abomination — in food, in drink, in 
luxury, in books, in art; whatsoever maketh 
a lie — in conversation, in social intercourse, in 
correspondence, in domestic life. This done, 
you have arranged for a Heaven, but you 
have not got it. Heaven lies within, in kind- 
ness, in humbleness, in unselfishness, in faith, 
in love, in service. To get these in, get Christ 
in. Teach all in the house about Christ — 
what He did, and what He said, and how 
He lived, and how He died, and how He 
dwells in them, and how He makes all one. 
Teach it not as a doctrine, but as a discovery, 



HIS SERVANTS SHALL SERVE. 2J 

as your own discovery. Live your own dis- 
covery. 

Then pass out into the City. Do all to it 
that you have done at home. Beautify it, 
ventilate it, drain it. Let nothing enter it 
that can defile the streets, the stage, the news- 
paper offices, the booksellers' counters ; noth- 
ing that maketh a lie in its warehouses, its 
manufactures, its shops, its art galleries, its 
advertisements. Educate it, amuse it, church 
it. Christianize capital ; dignify labour. Join 
Councils and Committees. Provide for the 
poor, the sick, and the widow. So will you 
serve the City. 

If you ask me which of all these things is 
the most important, I reply that among them 
there is only one thing of superlative im- 
portance, and that is yourself. By far the 
greatest thing a man can do for his City is 



28 THE CITY WITHOUT A CHURCH. 

to be a good man. Simply to live there as a 
good man, as a Christian man of action and 
practical citizen, is the first and highest con- 
tribution any one can make to its salvation. 
Let a City be a Sodom or a Gomorrah, and 
if there be but ten righteous men in it, it 
will be saved. 

It is here that the older, the more individ- 
ual, conception of Christianity, did such mighty 
work for the world — it produced good men. 
It is goodness that tells, goodness first and 
goodness last. Good men even with small 
views are immeasurably more important to the 
world than small men with great views. But 
given good men, such men as were produced 
even by the self-centred theology of an older 
generation, and add that wider outlook and 
social ideal which are coming to be the charac- 
teristics of the religion of this age, and Chris- 



HIS SERVANTS SHALL SERVE. 29 

tianity has an equipment for the reconstruction 
of the world, before which nothing can stand. 
Such good men will not merely content them- 
selves with being good men. They will be 
forces — according to their measure, public forces. 
They will take the City in hand, some a house, 
some a street, and some the whole. Of set 
purpose they will serve. Not ostentatiously, 
but silently, in ways varied as human nature, 
and many as life's opportunities, they will 
minister to its good. 

To help the people, also, to be good people 
— good fathers, and mothers, and sons, and 
citizens — is worth all else rolled into one. Ar- 
range the government of the City as you may, 
perfect all its philanthropic machinery, make 
righteous its relations great and small, equip 
it with galleries and parks, and libraries and 
music, and carry out the whole programme 



30 THE CITY WITHOUT A CHURCH. 

of social reform, and the one thing needful is 
still without the gates. The gospel of mate- 
rial blessedness is part of a gospel — a great and 
Christian part — but when held up as the 
whole gospel for the people it is as hollow as 
the void of life whose circumference even it 
fails to touch. 

There are countries in the world — new 
countries — where the people, rising to the 
rights of government, have already secured 
almost all that reformers cry for. The lot of 
the working-man there is all but perfect. 
His wages are high, his leisure great, his 
home worthy. Yet in tens of thousands of 
cases the secret of life is unknown. 

It is idle to talk of Christ as a social re- 
former, if by that is meant that His first con- 
cern was to improve the organization of 
society, or to provide the world with better 



HIS SERVANTS SHALL SERVE. 3 1 

laws. These were among His objects, but 
His first was to provide the world with bet- 
ter men. The one need of every cause and 
every community still is for better men. If 
every workshop held a Workman like Him 
who worked in the carpenter's shop at Naz- 
areth, the labour problem and all other work- 
man's problems would soon be solved. If 
every street had a home or two like Mary's 
home in Bethany, the domestic life of the 
city would be transformed in three genera- 
tions. 

External reforms — education, civilization, 
public schemes, and public charities — have 
each their part to play. Any experiment that 
can benefit by one hair-breadth any single hu- 
man life is a thousand times worth trying. 
There is no effort in any single one of these 
directions but must, as Christianity advances, 



32 THE CITY WITHOUT A CHURCH. 

be pressed by Christian men to ever further 
and fuller issues. But those whose hands 
have tried the most, and whose eyes have 
seen the furthest, have come back to regard 
first the deeper evangel of individual lives, 
and the philanthropy of quiet ways, and the 
slow work of leavening men one by one with 
the spirit of Jesus Christ. 

The thought that the future, that any day, 
may see some new and mighty enterprise of 
redemption, some new departure in religion, 
which shall change everything with a breath 
and make all that is crooked straight, is not 
at all likely to be realized. There is nothing 
wrong with the lines on which redemption 
runs at present except the want of faith to 
believe in them, and the want of men to use 
them. The Kingdom of God is like leaven, 
and the leaven is with us now. The quantity 



HIS SERVANTS SHALL SERVE. 33 

at work in the world may increase, but that is 
all. For nothing can ever be higher than the 
Spirit of Christ, or more potent as a regener- 
ating power on the lives of men. 

Do not charge me with throwing away my 
brief because I return to this old, old plea for 
the individual soul. I do not forget that my 
plea is for the City. But I plead for good men, 
because good men are good leaven. If their 
goodness stop short of that, if the leaven does 
not mix with that which is unleavened, if it 
does not do the work of leaven — that is, to 
raise something — it is not the leaven of Christ. 
The question for good men to ask themselves 
is : Is my goodness helping others? Is it a pri- 
vate luxury, or is it telling upon the City ? Is 
it bringing any single human soul nearer hap- 
piness or righteousness ? 

If you ask what particular scheme you shall 



34 THE CITY WITHOUT A CHURCH. 

take up, I cannot answer. Christianity has no 
set schemes. It makes no choice between con- 
flicting philanthropies, decides nothing between 
competing churches, favours no particular public 
policy, organizes no one line of private charity. 
It is not essential even for all of us to take any 
public or formal line. Christianity is not all 
carried on by Committees, and the Kingdom of 
God has other ways of coming than through 
municipal reforms. Most of the stones for the 
building of the City of God, and all the best of 
them, are made by mothers. But whether or 
no you shall work through public channels, or 
only serve Christ along the quieter paths of 
home, no man can determine but yourself. 

There is an almost awful freedom about 
Christ's religion. " I do not call you servants," 
He said, " for the servant knoweth not what his 
lord doeth. I have called you friends/ ' As 



HIS SERVANTS SHALL SERVE. 35 

Christ's friends, His followers are supposed to 
know what He wants done, and for the same 
reason they will try to do it — this is the whole 
working basis of Christianity. Surely, next to 
its love for the chief of sinners the most touch- 
ing thing about the religion of Christ is its 
amazing trust in the least of saints. Here is 
the mightiest enterprise ever launched upon 
this earth, mightier even than its creation, for it 
is its re-creation, and the carrying of it out is 
left, so to speak, to haphazard — to individual 
loyalty, to free enthusiasms, to uncoerced activ- 
ities, to an uncompelled response to the pres- 
sures of God's Spirit. 

Christ sets His followers no tasks. He ap- 
points no hours. He allots no sphere. He 
Himself simply went about and did good. He 
did not stop life to do some special thing which 
should be called religious. His life was His re- 



36 THE CITY WITHOUT A CHURCH. 

ligion. Each day as it came brought round in 
the ordinary course its natural ministry. Each 
village along the highway had someone waiting 
to be helped. His pulpit was the hillside, His 
congregation a woman at a well. The poor, 
wherever He met them, were His clients; the 
sick, as often as He found them, His oppor- 
tunity. His work was everywhere; His work- 
shop was the world. One's associations of 
Christ are all of the wayside. We never think 
of Him in connection with a Church. We can- 
not picture Him in the garb of a priest or be- 
longing to any of the classes who specialize 
religion. His service was of a universal human 
order. He was the Son of Man, the Citizen. 

This, remember, was the highest life ever 
lived, this informal citizen-life. So simple a 
thing it was, so natural, so human, that those 
who saw it first did not know it was religion, 



HIS SERVANTS SHALL SERVE. 37 

and Christ did not pass among them as a very- 
religious man. Nay, it is certain, and it is an 
infinitely significant thought, that the religious 
people of His time not only refused to accept 
this type of religion as any kind of religion at 
all, but repudiated and denounced Him as its 
bitter enemy. 

Inability to discern what true religion is, is 
not confined to the Pharisees. Multitudes still 
who profess to belong to the religion of Christ, 
scarcely know it when they see it. The truth is, 
men will hold to almost anything in the name 
of Christianity, believe anything, do anything 
— except its common and obvious tasks. Great 
is the mystery of what has passed in this world 
for religion. 





III. 



I SAW NO TEMPLE THERE. 



" I SAW no Church there," said John. Nor is 
there any note of surprise as he marks the 
omission of what one half of Christendom 
would have considered the first essential. For 
beside the type of religion he had learned from 
Christ, the Church type — the merely Church 
type — is an elaborate evasion. What have the 
pomp and circumstance, the fashion and the 
form, the vestures and the postures, to do with 
Jesus of Nazareth ? At a stage in personal 



I SAW NO TEMPLE THERE. 39 

development, and for a certain type of mind, 
such things may have a place. But when mis- 
taken for Christianity, no matter how they aid 
it, or in what measure they conserve it, they 
defraud the souls of men, and rob humanity of 
its dues. It is because to large masses of peo- 
ple Christianity has become synonymous with 
a Temple service that other large masses of 
people decline to touch it. It is a mistake to 
suppose that the working classes of this country 
are opposed to Christianity. No man can ever 
be opposed to Christianity who knows what it 
really is. The working-men would still follow 
Christ if He came among them. As a matter 
of fact they do follow anyone, preacher or 
layman, in pulpit or on platform, who is the 
least like Him. But what they cannot fol- 
low, and must evermore live outside of, is a 
worship which ends with the worshipper, a 



40 THE CITY WITHOUT A CHURCH. 

religion expressed only in ceremony, and a 
faith unrelated to life. 

Perhaps the most dismal fact of history is 
the failure of the great organized bodies of ec- 
clesiasticism to understand the simple genius 
of Christ's religion. Whatever the best in the 
Churches of all time may have thought of the 
life and religion of Christ, taken as a whole 
they have succeeded in leaving upon the mind 
of a large portion of the world an impression 
of Christianity which is the direct opposite of 
the reality. Down to the present hour, almost 
whole nations in Europe live, worship, and die 
under the belief that Christ is an ecclesiastical 
Christ, religion the sum of all the Churches' 
observances, and faith an adhesion to the 
Churches' creeds. I do not apportion blame ; 
I simply record the fact. Everything that the 
spiritual and temporal authority of man could 



I SAW NO TEMPLE THERE. 4 1 

do has been done — done in ignorance of the 
true nature of Christianity — to dislodge the 
religion of Christ from its natural home in 
the heart of Humanity. In many lands the 
Churches have literally stolen Christ from the 
people ; they have made the Son of Man the 
Priest of an Order ; they have taken Chris- 
tianity from the City and imprisoned it be- 
hind altar rails ; they have withdrawn it from 
the national life and doled it out to the few 
who pay to keep up the unconscious deception. 
Do not do the Church, the true Church at 
least, the injustice to think that she does not 
know all this. Nowhere, not even in the 
fiercest secular press, is there more exposure 
of this danger, more indignation at its con- 
tinuance, than in many of the Churches of 
to-day. The protest against the confusion of 
Christianity with the Church is the most 



42 THE CITY WITHOUT A CHURCH. 

threadbare of pulpit themes. Before the Uni- 
versity of Oxford, from the pulpit of St. 
Mary's, these words were lately spoken : " If 
it is strange that the Church of the darker 
ages should have needed so bitter a lesson 
(the actual demolition of their churches), is it 
not ten times stranger still that the Church 
of the days of greater enlightenment should 
be found again making the chief part of its 
business the organizing of the modes of wor- 
ship ; that the largest efforts which are owned 
as the efforts of the Church are made for 
the establishment and maintenance of wor- 
ship; that our chief controversies relate to the 
teaching and the ministry of a system de- 
signed primarily, if not exclusively, for wor- 
ship ; that even the fancies and the refinements 
of such a system divide us ; that the breach be- 
tween things secular and things religious grows 



I SAW NO TEMPLE THERE. 43 

wider instead of their being made to blend 
into one ; and that the vast and fruitful spaces 
of the actual life of mankind lie still so largely 
without the gates ? The old Jerusalem was 
all temple. The mediaeval Church was all 
temple. But the ideal of the new Jerusa- 
lem was — no temple, but a God-inhabited so- 
ciety. Are we not reversing this ideal in an 
age when the Church still means in so many 
mouths the clergy, instead of meaning the 
Christian society, and when nine men are 
striving to get men to go to church for one 
who is striving to make men realize that they 
themselves are the Church ? " 

Yet, even with words so strong as these 
echoing daily from Protestant pulpits, the su- 
perstition reigns in all but unbroken power. 
And everywhere still men are found confound- 
ing the spectacular services of a Church, the 



44 THE CITY WITHOUT A CHURCH. 

vicarious religion of a priest, and the tradi- 
tional belief in a creed, with the living relig- 
ion of the Son of Man. 

" I saw no Temple there " — the future City 
will be a City without a Church. Ponder that 
fact, realize the temporariness of the Church, 
then — go and build one. Do not imagine, be- 
cause all this has been said, that I mean to 
depreciate the Church. On the contrary, if it 
were mine to build a City, a City where all 
life should be religious, and all men destined 
to become members of the Body of Christ, 
the first stone I should lay there would be 
the foundation-stone of a Church. Why ? Be- 
cause, among other reasons, the product which 
the Church on the whole best helps to de- 
velop, and in the largest quantity, is that which 
is most needed by the City. 

For the present, and for a long time to come, 



I SAW NO TEMPLE THERE. 45 

the manufactory of good men, the nurseiy of 
the forces which are to redeem the City, will 
in the main be found to be some more or 
less formal, more or less imperfect, Christian 
Church. Here and there an unchurched soul 
may stir the multitudes to lofty deeds ; isolated 
men, strong enough to preserve their souls 
apart from the Church, but short-sighted enough 
perhaps to fail to see that others cannot, may 
set high examples and stimulate to national 
reforms. But for the rank and file of us, made 
of such stuff as we are made of, the steady 
pressures of fixed institutions, the regular diets 
of a common worship, and the education of 
public Christian teaching, are too obvious safe- 
guards of spiritual culture to be set aside. 
Even Renan declares his conviction that " Be- 
yond the family and outside the State, man 
has need of the Church. . . . Civil society, 



46 THE CITY WITHOUT A CHURCH. 

whether it calls itself a commune, a canton, or 
a province, a state, or fatherland, has many 
duties towards the improvement of the indi- 
vidual ; but what it does is necessarily limited. 
The family ought to do much more, but often 
it is insufficient ; sometimes it is wanting alto- 
gether. The association created in the name of 
moral principle can alone give to every man 
coming into this world a bond which unites 
him with the past, duties as to the future, ex- 
amples to follow, a heritage to receive and to 
transmit, and a tradition of devotion to con- 
tinue." Apart altogether from the quality of 
its contribution to society, in the mere quan- 
tity of the work it turns out it stands alone. 
Even for social purposes the Church is by 
far the greatest Employment Bureau in the 
world. And the man who. seeing where it 
falls short, withholds on that account his wit- 



I SAW NO TEMPLE THERE. 47 

ness to its usefulness, is a traitor to history 
and to fact. 

" The Church," as the preacher whom I have 
already quoted most truly adds, " is a society 
which tends to embrace the whole life of man- 
kind, to bind all their relations together by a 
Divine sanction. As such, it blends naturally 
with the institutions of common life — those in- 
stitutions which, because they are natural and 
necessary, are therefore Divine. What it aims 
at is not the recognition by the nation of a 
worshipping body, governed by the ministers of 
public worship, which calls itself the Church, 
but that the nation and all classes in it should 
act upon Christian principle, that laws should 
be made in Christ's spirit of justice, that the 
relations of the powers of the state should be 
maintained on a basis of Christian equity, that 
all public acts should be done in Christ's spirit, 



48 THE CITY WITHOUT A CHURCH. 

and with mutual forbearance, that the spirit of 
Christian charity should be spread through all 
ranks and orders of the people. The Church 
will maintain public worship as one of the 
greatest supports of a Christian public life ; 
but it will always remember that the true ser- 
vice is a life of devotion to God and man far 
more than the common utterance of prayer/' 

I have said that, were it mine to build a City, 
the first stone I should lay there would be the 
foundation-stone of a Church. But if it were 
mine to preach the first sermon in that Church, 
I should choose as the text, " I saw no Church 
therein." I should tell the people that the 
great use of the Church is to help men to do 
without it. As the old ecclesiastical term has 
it, Church services are " diets " of worship. 
They are meals. All who are hungry will take 
them, and, if they are wise, regularly. But no 



I SAW NO TEMPLE THERE. 49 

workman is paid for his meals. He is paid for 
the work he does in the strength of them. No 
Christian is paid for going to Church. He 
goes there for a meal, for strength from God 
and from his fellow-w r orshippers to do the work 
of life — which is the work of Christ. The 
Church is a Divine institution because it is so 
very human an institution. As a channel of 
nourishment, as a stimulus to holy deeds, as a 
link with all holy lives, let all men use it, and 
to the utmost of their opportunity. But by 
ail that they know of Christ or care for man, 
let them beware of mistaking its services for 
Christianity. What Church services really ex- 
press is the want of Christianity. And when 
that which is perfect in Christianity is come, 
all this, as the mere passing stay and scaffold- 
ing of struggling souls, must vanish away. 

If the masses who never go to Church only 
4 



SO THE CITY WITHOUT A CHURCH. 

knew that the Churches were the mute ex- 
pression of a Christian's wants, and not the 
self-advertisement of his sanctity, they would 
have more respectful words for Churches. But 
they have never learned this. And the result 
in their case of confounding religion with the 
Church is even more serious than in the case 
of the professing Christian. When they break 
with the Church it means to them a break 
with all religion. As things are it could scarce 
be otherwise. With the Church in ceaseless 
evidence before their eyes as the acknowledged 
custodian of Christianity ; with actual stone 
and lime in every street representing the place 
where religion dwells ; with a professional class 
moving out and in among them, holding in 
their hands the souls of men, and almost the 
keys of Heaven — how is it possible that those 
who turn their backs on all this should not 






I SAW NO TEMPLE THERE. 5 1 

feel outcast from the Church's God ? It is 
not possible. Without a murmur, yet with 
results to themselves most disastrous and 
pathetic, multitudes accept this false dividing- 
line and number themselves as excommunicate 
from all good. The masses will never return 
to the Church till its true relation to the City 
is more defined. And they can never have 
that most real life of theirs made religious 
so long as they rule themselves out of court 
on the ground that they have broken with 
ecclesiastical forms. The life of the masses 
is the most real of all lives. It is full of 
religious possibilities. Every movement of it 
and every moment of it might become of 
supreme religious value, might hold a con- 
tinuous spiritual discipline, might perpetuate, 
and that in most natural ways, a moral in- 
fluence which should pervade all Cities and all 



52 THE CITY WITHOUT A CHURCH. 

States. But they must first be taught what 
Christianity really is, and learn to distinguish 
between religion and the Church. After that, 
if they be taught their lesson well, they will 
return to honour both. 

Our fathers made much of "meetness" for 
Heaven. By prayer and fasting, by self-ex- 
amination and meditation they sought to fit 
themselves " for the inheritance of the saints in 
light." Important beyond measure in their 
fitting place are these exercises of the soul. 
But whether alone they fit men for the inherit- 
ance of the saints depends on what a saint is. 
If a saint is a devotee and not a citizen, if 
Heaven is a cathedral and not a City, then 
these things do fit for Heaven. But if life 
means action, and Heaven service ; if spiritual 
graces are acquired for use and not for orna- 
ment, then devotional forms have a deeper 



I SAW NO TEMPLE THERE. 53 

function. The Puritan preachers were wont to 
tell their people to " practise dying." Yes; but 
what is dying ? It is going to a City. And 
what is required of those who would go to a 
City ? The practice of Citizenship — the due 
employment of the unselfish talents, the devel- 
opment of public spirit, the payment of the 
full tax to the great brotherhood, the subordi- 
nation of personal aims to the common good. 
And where are these to be learned ? Here ; 
in Cities here. There is no other way to learn 
them. There is no Heaven to those who have 
not learned them. 

No Church however holy, no priest however 
earnest, no book however sacred, can transfer to 
any human character the capacities of Citizen- 
ship — those capacities which in the very nature 
of things are necessities to those who would live 
in the kingdom of God. The only preparation 



54 THE CITY WITHOUT A CHURCH. 

which multitudes seem to make for Heaven is 
for its Judgment Bar. What will they do in 
its streets ? What have they learned of Citi- 
zenship ? What have they practised of love ? 
How like are they to its Lord ? To " practise 
dying " is to practise living. Earth is the re- 
hearsal for Heaven. The eternal beyond is the 
eternal here. The street-life, the home-life, the 
business-life, the City-life in all the varied range 
of its activity, are an apprenticeship for the 
City of God. There is no other apprenticeship 
for it. To know how to serve Christ in these 
is to " practise dying." 

To move among the people on the common 
street ; to meet them in the market-place on 
equal terms ; to live among them not as saint 
or monk, but as brother-man with brother-man ; 
to serve God not with form or ritual, but in the 
free impulse of a soul ; to bear the burdens of 



I SAW NO TEMPLE THERE. 55 

society and relieve its needs ; to carry on the 
multitudinous activities of the City — social, 
commercial, political, philanthropic — in Christ's 
spirit and for His ends : this is the religion of 
the Son of Man, and the only meetness for 
Heaven which has much reality in it. 

No, the Church with all its splendid equip- 
ment, the cloister with all its holy opportunity, 
are not the final instruments for fitting men for 
Heaven. The City, in many of its functions, 
is a greater Church than the Church. It is 
amid the whirr of its machinery and in the 
discipline of ifs life that the souls of men are 
really made. How great its opportunity is we 
are few of us aware. It is such slow work get- 
ting better, the daily round is so very common, 
our ideas of a heavenly life are so unreal and 
mystical, that even when the highest Heaven 
lies all around us, when we might touch it, and 



56 THE CITY WITHOUT A CHURCH. 

dwell in it every day we live, we almost fail to 
see that it is there. The Heaven of our child- 
hood, the spectacular Heaven, the Heaven 
which is a place \ so dominates thought even in 
our maturer years, that we are slow to learn the 
fuller truth that Heaven is a state. But John, 
who is responsible before all other teachers for 
the dramatic view of Heaven, has not failed in 
this very allegory to proclaim the further les- 
son. Having brought all his scenery upon the 
stage and pictured a material Heaven of almost 
unimaginable splendour, the seer turns aside be- 
fore he closes for a revelation of a profounder 
kind. Within the Heavenly City he opens the 
gate of an inner Heaven. It is the spiritual 
Heaven — the Heaven of those who serve. 
With two flashes of his pen he tells the Citi- 
zens of God all that they will ever need or care 
to know as to what Heaven really means. 



I SAW NO TEMPLE THERE. $7 

" His servants shall serve Him ; and they shall 
see His Face ; and His Character shall be writ- 
ten on their characters" 

They shall see His face. Where ? In the 
City. In Eternity ? No ; to-morrow. Those 
who serve in any City cannot help continually 
seeing Christ. He is there with them. He is 
there before them. They cannot but meet. 
No gentle word is ever spoken that Christ's 
voice does not also speak ; no meek deed is ever 
done that the unsummoned Vision does not 
there and then appear, Whoso, in whatsoever 
place, receiveth a little child in My name re- 
ceiveth Me. 

This is how men get to know God — by doing 
His will. And there is no other way. And 
this is how men become like God ; how God's 
character becomes written upon men's char- 
acters. Acts react upon souls. Good acts 



58 THE CITY WITHOUT A CHURCH. 

make good men ; just acts, just men ; kind acts, 
kind men ; divine acts, divine men. And there 
is no other way of becoming good, just, kind, 
divine. And there is no Heaven for those who 
have not become these. For these are Heaven. 
When John's Heaven faded from his sight, 
and the prophet woke to the desert waste of 
Patmos, did he grudge to exchange the Heaven 
of his dream for the common tasks around 
him ? Was he not glad to be alive, and there ? 
And would he not straightway go to the City, 
to whatever struggling multitude his prison- 
rock held, if so be that he might prove his 
dream and among them see His Face ? Trav- 
eller to God's last City, be glad that you are 
alive. Be thankful for the City at your door 
and for the chance to build its walls a little 
nearer Heaven before you go. Pray for yet a 
little while to redeem the wasted years. And 



I SAW NO TEMPLE THERE. 



59 



week by week as you go forth from worship, 
and day by day as you awake to face this great 
and needy world, learn to " seek a City " there, 
and in the service of its neediest citizen find 
Heaven. 




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